Reevaluate your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

With the New Year comes the resolutions. When the clock struck midnight on January 1st, 2015 many people turned the page on 2014 and made a promise to do an act of self-improvement. Often times it’s eating healthier or going to the gym more regularly. With the New Year, I thought I could put a spin on a typical New Year’s Resolution and make it about AWS.

How could you improve on your AWS environment? Without getting too overzealous, let’s focus on the fundamental AWS network infrastructure, specifically an AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). An AWS VPC is a logically isolated, user controlled, piece of the AWS Cloud where you can launch and use other AWS resources. You can think of it as your own slice of AWS network infrastructure that you can fully customize and tailor to your needs. So let’s talk about VPCs and how you can improve on yours.

Make sure you’re using VPCs! The simple act of implementing a VPC can put you way ahead of the game. VPCs provide a ton of customization options from defining your own VPC size via IP addressing; to controlling subnets, route tables, and gateways for controlling network flow between your resources; to even defining fine-grained security using security groups and network ACLs. With VPCs you can control things that simply can’t be done when using EC2-Classic.

Are you using multiple Availability Zones (AZs)? An AZ is a distinct isolated location engineered to be inaccessible from failures of other AZs. Make sure you take advantage of using multiple AZs with your VPC. Often time instances are just launched into a VPC with no rhyme or reason. It is great practice to use the low-latency nature and engineered isolation of AZs to facilitate high availability or disaster recovery scenarios.

Are you using VPC security groups? “Of course I am.” Are you using network ACLs? “I know they are available, but I don’t use them.” Are you using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to secure access to your VPCs? “Huh, what’s an IAM?!” Don’t fret, most environments don’t take advantage of all the tools available for securing a VPC, however now is the time reevaluate your VPC and see if you can or even should use these security options. Security groups are ingress and egress firewall rules you place on individual AWS resources in your VPC and one of the fundamental building blocks of an environment. Now may be a good time to audit the security groups to make sure you’re using the principle of least privilege, or not allowing any access or rules that are not absolutely needed. Network ACLs work at the subnet level and may be useful in some cases. In larger environments IAM may be a good idea if you want more control of how resources interact with your VPC. In any case there is never a bad time to reevaluate security of your environment, particularly your VPC.

Clean up your VPC! One of the most common issues in AWS environments are resources that are not being used. Now may be a good time to audit your VPC and take note of what instances you have out there and make sure you don’t have resources racking up unnecessary charges. It’s a good idea to account for all instances, leftover EBS volumes, and even clean up old AMIs that may be sitting in your account. There are also things like extra EIPs, security groups, and subnets that can be cleaned up. One great tool to use would be AWS Trusted Advisor. Per the AWS service page, “Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and finds opportunities to save money, improve system performance and reliability, or help close security gaps.”

Bring your VPC home. AWS, being a public cloud provider, allows you to create VPCs that are isolated from everything, including your on-premise LAN or datacenter. Because of this isolation all network activity between the user and their VPC happens over the internet. One of the great things about VPCs are the many types of connectivity options they provide. Now is the time to reevelautate how you use VPCs in conjunction with your local LAN environment. Maybe it is time to setup a VPN and turn your environment into a hybrid cloud and physical environment allowing all communication to pass over a private network. You can even take it one step further by incorporating AWS Direct Connect, a service that allows you to establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment. This can help reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent overall network experience.

These are just a few things you can do when reevaluating your AWS VPC for the New Year. By following these guidelines you can gain efficiencies in your environment you didn’t have before and can rest assured your environment is in the best shape possible for all your new AWS goals of 2015.